Enola Holmes, the Netflix film that is based on The Enola Holmes Mysteries novels by Nancy Springer explores the notion of Sherlock Holmes having a sister. While Sherlock’s sibling is his older brother Mycroft only in the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Enola Holmes and Sherlock are two adaptations that have added a younger sister to the family. But definitely, these two are the different interpretations.
Eurus Holmes is one year younger than her brother Sherlock, was the antagonist of the episode “The Final Problem”.
Confined in the high-security prison Sherrinford since her childhood, Eurus was deemed a hazardous “era-defining genius” who wielded her intellect to “reprogram” people and falsify them to do her will. While Enola’s proto-feminist objectives may have been deemed dangerous to the patriarchal landscape of Victorian England, Enola Holmes is the exact opposite of Eurus, and rather uses her psyche to unravel missing person cases. While both Enola and Eurus share some resemblances, such as the fact that their personalities are interpreted by the meaning of their names, Enola is a better exemplification of Holmes’ birthright in comparison to Eurus.
Unlike Eurus, whose brain was summarized to such a high level that she essentially just had superpowers, Enola lives up to her stature as a Holmes and properly indicates her deductive skills. Enola unravels her mother Eudoria’s (Helena Bonham Carter) anagrams, discovers the location of her mother’s private lab, and unravels the dilemma of who was trying to kill Viscount Tewksbury (Louis Partridge) before Sherlock. Enola cleverly avoids her brothers and the skepticism of others by masking herself as a widow and men from the working class, people in society who mix into the background (similar to Sherlock in the original stories) and even organizes to turn corsets into a tactical benefit rather than an impediment.
While the audience is notified that Eurus is a manipulative master in Sherlock, her proficiency to reprogram people is never appropriately explained or indicated to the audience, which makes the tremendous feats she achieves (such as convincing the Prison Governor to give her free rein of Sherrinford) seem more like magic than skill.
Enola Holmes Challenges The Detective Genre, Provides A Powerful Story
The character of Enola also had the advantage of prevailing in an all-around stronger and powerful story with deeper significance. In Sherlock, Eurus takes over Sherrinford and arranges a series of mind games to emotionally distress her brothers and Watson (Martin Freeman), which Sherlock only goes along with in order to protect a little girl who has entangled alone on a plane in midair. A plot twist, however, indicates that Eurus was the little girl Sherlock was talking to on the phone. She feels always stuck by herself on that allegorical aircraft and only ever wished for a friend – particularly her brother Sherlock.
Enola Holmes is a story of a female detective who is subjugated by the time period and the society she lives in. Enola is challenging traditional Victorian values, but also she is challenging the detective genre as a whole.
